Keith Meyers/The New York Times
Barbara Piasecka Johnson in 1986 at her 140-acre estate.
Barbara Piasecka Johnson, whose rags-to-riches tale — an immigrant maid marries a multimillionaire and inherits all of his money, fending off the furious claims of his children — was at the center of what one writer called "the largest, costliest, ugliest, most spectacular and most conspicuous" probate battle in American history, died on Monday near Wroclaw, Poland, where she spent much of her childhood. She was 76.
Ricky Stachowicz, the general counsel for Mrs. Johnson's family office, said she died after a long illness, which he did not specify.
Mrs. Johnson — she preferred Mrs. to Ms., Mr. Stachowicz said, and was known as Basia (pronounced BOSH-uh) — lived a fractured fairy tale of a life. When she arrived in the United States from Poland in 1968, she had perhaps $200 in her pocket. She spent her first night in New York City in a dingy hotel room.
Through a series of serendipitous connections, she was hired shortly thereafter as a cook by Esther Underwood Johnson, better known as Essie, the second wife of J. Seward Johnson Sr., heir to the Johnson & Johnson Band-Aid and baby powder fortune.
Miss Piasecka was not much of a cook, it turned out, so her duties at the Johnson estate in Oldwick, N.J., became more of a maid's. She left in 1969 to take art classes at New York University; Mr. Johnson set her up in a Manhattan apartment, and later moved in with her. In 1971, Mr. Johnson divorced his wife and married Miss Piasecka. She was 34; her husband was 76.
None of Mr. Johnson's six children were invited to the wedding.
During their 12 years of marriage, Mrs. Johnson, who had studied art history in Poland, created a valuable collection of Flemish tapestries, 18th-century furniture and paintings and drawings by Rembrandt, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Raphael and others. Together they built a 140-acre estate in Princeton, valued from $20 million to $30 million, and called it Jasna Polana — "bright glade" in Polish — echoing the name of Leo Tolstoy's Russian home.
When Mr. Johnson died in 1983, one of the great celebrity soap operas of the 20th century ensued.
He bequeathed to his wife virtually all of his holdings, reported to be worth as much as $500 million, and omitted all but one of his children from his will altogether.
The children, all of whom were millionaires themselves as a result of trusts their father had set up for them, challenged the will, claiming that Mrs. Johnson had exerted undue influence on their father and that he had been too enfeebled to resist changes to the will that his wife had bullied him into making.
Thus began a furious three-year legal tussle that involved leading law firms — legal bills totaled more than $24 million — mountains of paperwork and four months of sometimes tawdry testimony that exposed the unhappy private lives in one of America's richest families.
Witnesses testified that Mrs. Johnson had screamed at and even hit her aging, bewildered husband; others said that they were affectionate with each other and evidently happy and that Mr. Johnson was alert and coherent at the time he changed his will.
Among the many subplots in the case, the lawyer who drew up the contested will, Nina S. Zagat, was accused by the children's lawyers, as a friend of Mrs. Johnson, of having a conflict of interest in the case; and Marie M. Lambert, the judge who heard the case in Manhattan Surrogate's Court, was asked by Mrs. Johnson's lawyers to recuse herself because of what they perceived as blatant favoritism toward the children.
The case was settled shortly before it was to go to the jury. Mrs. Johnson kept more than $300 million of the estate, the children received more than $40 million in total, and Harbor Branch, an oceanographic institute that Mr. Johnson founded and that was also party to the suit, was awarded $20 million. Legal fees and taxes also claimed a share. In the aftermath, both sides claimed victory and held celebrations. The jurors and the judge attended the children's party.
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